Worldie wrote:They are there to keep people running LFR. If they weren't there, the population of LFR would MASSIVELY drop, and I mean, MASSIVELY, because most chars would run them once (if even) and never set foot in them again, essentially making it impossible to have reliable queue timers for non-current content LFR.

As someone who is working to get my last ilvl to be able to do the more current LFRs... I waited over 5 hours in queue for HoF LFR a couple days ago... finally gave up because I had to log off...

And yes, the BT attunement was removed a ways into the expansion, but the point still stands that they wanted people to be able to see the content. If you go around making Mythic only raids... that's taking a step backwards. Unless you're suggesting that after a few months it's okay to nerf it to the ground so other people can access it...

P.S. Your "kill 1337/chat speak" sig has an error... "Dont you get it?" is missing its apostrophe.

The way the game and its players have evolved now, nobody will enjoy doing the attunements, not even the people that want them back so desperately. I really enjoyed the idea of having to do all those quest chains to get into instances back then, it gave a great feeling of accomplishment etc. However, right now if they re-implemented them, it might be somewhat cool at the start, but then when you need to make an alt and go through it again, or when you gotta speed-attune some new guildie who just came back to the game cause you wanna raid with them, then it'll start looking not-so-great once again...

I dunno, maybe a system could be used where if your guild has a number of people already attuned you can enter the instance? But that the questline is still there if you wanna access it? Or maybe if you get attuned on one char it's account wide?

Veering off the current topic/argument, but still on the subject of difficult content for higher end players, am I right in thinking something was said at Blizzcon about making challenging dungeons that aren't just timed runs like the current Challenge Mode?

I dunno, maybe a system could be used where if your guild has a number of people already attuned you can enter the instance? But that the questline is still there if you wanna access it? Or maybe if you get attuned on one char it's account wide?

Lieris wrote:I think that having a second flex difficulty is redundant that's all and having 4+ tiers of loot isn't very healthy for the game. Just make the first few bosses easy and use targeted nerfs on problem bosses/abilities and do something to lock out Mythic raiders from flex or make it not worth their while otherwise people will burn out.

Except that doesn't actually work as well. I know several guilds that are literally progressing through Flex. They can't handle normal difficulty, but they also don't enjoy the LFR "experience." Your solution would have them stuck with the first 2-3 bosses to kill for the majority of a tier (see, for example, Horridon, which killed a lot of 10-man casual guilds). The data suggests that those players just quit.

Horridon killed a lot of 10 man guilds because it was poorly tuned and wasn't nerfed soon enough. I am suggesting easy intro bosses and sensible timely targeted nerfs especially when it's obvious that a boss is a brick wall when it shouldn't be one, for example one being so early in the instance that it can't be out-geared. There's no reason to have two flex difficulties if done correctly.

But again, you're assuming that guild will grind away at, let's say, boss #5 for a few weeks to get the kill. That's just not very realistic for a friends & family guild. Hell, it's not even all that realistic for most normal-mode guilds anymore. If you're stuck on a boss for 4+ weeks, in many cases your guild falls apart. Some of that is changing expectations (ex: in BC that was the norm!), but some of it is demographic differences. Those friends & family players aren't usually the same players that would have ground away at a boss for 2 months in Vanilla/BC. They have an entirely different motivation than a serious/hardcore raider does.

Lieris wrote:

I'm also not sure what you're basing your argument about 4+ tiers of loot on. Saying that something "isn't very healthy" for the game is fairly meaningless because it's so vague. What problems specifically do you think it causes that cannot be fixed by choosing item levels intelligently?

Item inflation (we'll see how well the squish deals with this) and there being a gulf between the players doing the lowest and highest difficulties making it harder for players to make the step up from LFR to Mythic. Also while there will always be guild hopping, I think this encourages it and a lot of normal mode flex guilds will end up acting as feeder guilds for heroic mode flex guilds (who don't face the same problem because not everyone wants to do 20m raiding at a high difficulty).

Item inflation doesn't need to be a factor at all. That all has to do with the item level choices. For example, if Normal Tier X+1 is only 13-20 ilvls ahead of Normal Tier X, and every other difficulty level follows that same pattern, then a lot of the issues with having multiple difficulties goes away. Item inflation is no worse than it would be without those difficulty levels, guilds wouldn't feel a large incentive to run content below their target level, and so on.

I'm not sure I buy the feeder guild theory, insofar as that happens regardless of the difficulty levels you put in. Sure, I can see more hopping between Normal/Heroic than between either difficulty and Mythical, but that has more to do with raid spot availability. And arguably, that's an outcome of having more people raiding. I'm not sure "fewer people raiding, with fewer guild hops" is necessarily better than "more people raiding and more guild hops."

Incalcando wrote:I dunno, maybe a system could be used where if your guild has a number of people already attuned you can enter the instance? But that the questline is still there if you wanna access it? Or maybe if you get attuned on one char it's account wide?

That first idea is exactly what Everquest did years ago with the Planes of Power attunement chain. Imagine an entire expansion of zones almost all of which were locked until you started working up through group content and non-instanced raid boss kills. The server I played on eventually started following a gentleman's agreement where guilds would take people with for raid kills if they were in another guild that had downed the boss in question.

It was really nice when Verant added the functionality where you could take unattuned people with if 90 (might have been 95) percent of the raid was attuned.

Heh, there's some points where the guy in the video strikes true, but also a lot of points where he's wrong.

I can see how "Climbing up to face the challenge" is something cool, and if the game could somehow allow everyone to experience that feeling, then that would be awesome, but it's not. Sure, for the people that actually have the time and dedication to step up to the content, yes, having a single hard mode that they could grow into would be fantastic. Unfortunately, for each such person, there are a dozen people who don't have the time, don't have the dedication, don't have the skill, or don't want to go there without abandoning their friends. Even as that video described, very few people got to see Naxx, or kill any bosses in the later TBC instances. Raiding would remain something for the select few.

Then there's the idea of different dungeon levels. Instead of 1 SoO, have an easy 6 man raid, a moderate 6 man raid, and a hard 6 man raid. Let's assume for a moment that having only to tune each instance once would make up for the work on 4 additional bosses, so work-wise it would be feasable. What would happen? We'd end up with 3 different types of raid instances, each with 6 bosses:

- The Queue-able instance. The one that you enter through the LFG panel. This would be much like LFR today, only the people that would run it would only have 6 bosses to enjoy, rather than 14. Anybody who doesn't have the time or motivation to be a member of a raid team, who is currently stuck with LFR, would be stuck with this content. They would either spend a lot less time on their weekly raid content, or the bosses would be harder and the extra time is taken up by wiping a lot more. Either way, the quality of their experience would certainly be less than it is today with all 14 bosses they have access to. Meanwhile, since they are completely separate instances, I assume they also have completely separate loot, so there's always the chance that some item just happens to be better itemized for your class/spec than the items that drop in your own instance, so normals/heroics might see themselves farming lower difficulty content not just as filler for items they would eventually get on their own difficulty level, but also for certain items that are in their BiS list.

- The Flex-able instance. The one that you can run with a variable amount of players. The queuers would never see this content at all. They might invite a buddy, form a raid, and check out the entrance, but that would be about it. There might be some who would form a group to grind trash packs, but that's about it. You would not be able to experience the instance without working together with at least nine like minded individuals, which is just not possible for a decent amount of the player base. The heroic raiders would blaze through it once or twice, to see the content, and pick up gear to help them clear the heroic instance, and like with the Queue-able instance, there might be drops here that, due to the itemization, are better than the drops in the heroic instance. However, a heroic raider cannot say for himself "I'm going to farm the Flex-able version.", but needs at least nine of his raiding buddies to help, which is gonna be pain on top of the heroic farming. Now as for the normal raiders, to whom this content is intended, you now have 6 bosses to grind your way through, instead of the 14 that you had before. This can mean two things. First, the easier and harder bosses are still there, so you have 2-3 harder bosses, and the rest you can clear soon enough, so there's only 2-3 bosses that have any real progression. So those 2-3 bosses are supposed to keep you busy for an entire tier. Alternatively, all 6 bosses could be hard, from the very first boss and up. Remember, these aren't the heroic raiders. These are the raiders with some time and dedication to focus on raiding, but not with the skills and time to kill the hardest of bosses, or bravery to keep on going and going until the boss goes down. Since every boss is a hard boss, you can't eventually outgear the bosses, since you first need to get the first boss down. So either the normal raiders are roadblocked from the get go, or they have very little content available to them. And it won't be easy to step up after clearing the content on normal, with the sudden fixed 20 person requirement for the next dungeon, if all they want to do is kill 1-2 more bosses before the next Tier hits.

- And finally there's the heroic instance, that very few will see. First, from what I heard, the heroic raiders weren't happy with the 7 and 8 bosses from Tier 12 and 13. Do we really assume they'll be happy with 6 bosses now? Would all 6 of these be at endboss level? If so, wouldn't that take the endboss feeling away? And would that force them into running the Flex-able dungeon until they have the required gear to down the first bosses? Or would they down the first bosses soon enough, and then have to farm those bosses for gear for the later bosses? Or would they be able to kill all 6 bosses in the first two weeks, and then enjoy themselves killing the same 6 bosses over and over again until the next tier hits.

The video is also pretty skewy with the information. Most bosses were bottlenecked by buggy/impossible encounters, and the guilds that did kill Illidan then had to wait for the rest of the expansion for basically only one additional 6 boss dungeon. Even if that wasn't the case, theorycrafting was nearly nonexisting at the start of TBC, so of course everything took a lot longer. Either way, having everything to do at the start of the expansion, and then nothing to do for the rest of the expansion cannot be a smart decision for a subscriber based franchise.

Now as for quests, I would love to see large world quests making a return. I loved my Charger quest, as well as the Tier 0.5 quest. Those were awesome. I also did quite like most of the attunement quests, especially in Vanilla, though in TBC they overhauled it to be artificial gating, which I'm not much a fan of. (You could attune yourself to BWL or Naxx without ever setting foot in MC, for example.)

I do agree that bringing back attunements is not a good thing, and I'm actually surprised that they gave Ordos the biggest attunement quest up to date. However, they can provide interesting questlines without making them a requirement for something else. Tier 0.5 questline? They could definitely make something like that that requires you to visit all 9 dungeons, most scenarios and some of the LFRs, as well as a lot of world locations and do various stuff at various locations to be rewarded with an epic 476 set that looks amazing and would be awesome for Transmog. Players that couldn't care less could ignore it, while players that would be interested in that kind of stuff have a serious questline ahead of them.

I call bullshit on that, so what raiding now means that you have to clear every boss of every instance to be able to consider yourself a reaider, that's a lot of horeshit.

Raiding does not have to be about clearing everything and there were a huge load of BC players that were casual players, less skilled and so on that never stepped foot in BT/MH until 2.4, let alone Sunwell so their experience was limited to SSC/TK.

Guess what though they still had fun.

How did I know before I even clicked on that link that it would be from that delusional hack Mike Preach.

That delusional hack as you call him was one in some of the best guilds in world in Vanilla/BC, he's a former raid leader, tank and even a former guild leader.

I am sure people like you who have gotten hand held by Blizzard for years now don't even grasp how difficult it is to raid lead a guild like that, but show some fucking respect. You want to disagree with him, go ahead.

I'll disagree right now, and I was guild leader and assistant raidleader (meaning I co-led the raids, quite often) in TBC*. Sure we didn't clear Sunwell, but we got down Archimonde before he was nerfed.

* - Oh and that wasn't a festive thing either - having to get multiple guilds to join forces for the 25man raids, with idfferent guild philosophies and all, I remembe rlosing a guilds and gaining guilds in that forced alliance.

I'll disagree right now, and I was guild leader and assistant raidleader (meaning I co-led the raids, quite often) in TBC*.

There is no sane person on this planet who's been a GM and/or raid leader who can tell you they enjoyed wiping for weeks on bosses because certain idiots could never get things right "Cough" Gorefiend "Cough". Especially on fucking farm and yes I did my part as raid leader and raid assistant.

But that's not the case for the average player who doesn't care about such things, and there were and still are plenty of people who don't give a shit about anything else other then what they have to do personally.

I remembe rlosing a guilds and gaining guilds in that forced alliance.

That's how I lost my Karazhan guild, we had good players but we didn't have 25 active people to raid 25 man and well it collapsed since people wanted progress.

The problem wasn't in the raid difficulty it was rather in the fact that going from a 10 man raiding team to a 25 man raiding was never easy, you realistically needed at least 30 people, and that's if you are lucky. Problem was that going for more then 2 10 man teams is not ideal, and it's hard enough to find a single capable raid leader let alone two.